#online data

Some news on the internet security/personal privacy front that you may find useful:

FTC Announces Plans to Begin Important Privacy Rulemaking (Source: Commondreams.org, 11Aug, 2022)

On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission opened its long-anticipated rulemaking on measures to stop corporations and other commercial actors from abusing people’s personal data. In June, the agency announced that it was considering this rulemaking to safeguard privacy and create protections against algorithmic decision-making that results in unlawful discrimination. Today it released an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“ANPR”) on the topic. This is the first step in building a formal agency record for potential regulations that would be based on public comments about “commercial surveillance and data security practices that harm consumers.”

INVISV Launches PGPP (Pretty Good Phone Privacy) to Provide a New Level of Privacy for Mobile Communications (Source: Associated Press, 8 Aug 2022)

  In a nutshell, when you use Relay to visit a website or use an app, your phone will send an encrypted signal to INVISV, which will then pass that request along to a second relay point which is operated by the Fastly, a content delivery network. This has the effect of separating your IP address from your data traffic, with neither INVISV nor Fastly having all the information required to know which data was sent to which phone. 

[[NOTE: I’m not advocating for this new carrier, I’m just making a note that it exists and will be watching to see how it preforms as it is released]]

Watchdogs Say FTC Must Foster Internet 'Free from Unwanted Surveillance' (Source: Commondreams.org, 12Aug, 2022)

"The need for protections against companies' over-collection and retention of sensitive data has also come into stark relief as state prosecutors subpoena tech companies for private information about people seeking reproductive healthcare information and services.”

The importance of protecting privacy in a post-Roe world (Source: techxplore.com, 12 Aug, 2022)

  "Big Tech has shown again and again that they will choose monetizing user data over protecting individual privacy, and the federal government has been reluctant to offer serious regulation," she says. "So if people want to keep their information private, especially when it comes to reproductive care, the time to learn the basics of online privacy is now. Some of my favorite resources are the Our Data Bodies project, the Tech Learning Collective, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

New cover-up fears as Chinese officials delete critical data about the Wuhan lab with details of 300 studies vanishing – including all those carried out by virologist dubbed Batwoman

Chinese government facing fresh accusations of cover-up after data is deleted  Deletion of evidence reignited fears China is trying to whitewash investigation China has been accused before of suppressing vital evidence about virus origins

Facebook is also a data broker / data provider who purchases your offline data. FB combines your offline and online data for profit — $55.8 billion in revenue for 2018.

Thanks to a new Vermont law requiring companies that buy and sell third-party personal data to register with the Secretary of State, we’ve been able to assemble a list of 121 data brokers operating in the U.S. It’s a rare, rough glimpse into a bustling economy that operates largely in the shadows, and often with few rules.

Even Vermont’s first-of-its-kind law, which went into effect last month, doesn’t require data brokers to disclose who’s in their databases, what data they collect, or who buys it. Nor does it require brokers to give consumers access to their own data or opt out of data collection. Brokers are, however required to provide some information about their opt-out systems under the law–assuming they provide one.

read about “DELETING” YOUR DATA

You are the product  — #SurveillanceEconomy — scared?

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

In the mid-1990s, Target was a discount superstore behemoth.

The retailer had set itself apart from chief rival Walmart with a focus on more upscale but wallet-friendly fashion and lifestyle lines, spurring double-digit growth by double-digits each year for more than a decade.

That fruitful streak came to an abrupt halt with the United States financial crash in the fall of 2008. Target was hit hard—much harder, in fact, than Walmart. Five years later the company was still struggling.

With more than 1,800 stores and a relatively new e-commerce site, Target was collecting reams of data about its online customers—products purchased, browsing habits, items abandoned in shopping carts—yet it wasn’t fully leveraging all that information. The company began to see this huge pile of e-commerce data as the needle-in-a-haystack key to driving higher sales, says Harvard Business School Professor Srikant M. Datar in a recent case study, Data Science at Target, co-written with research associate Caitlin N. Bowler.

“Target had to make this big shift from thinking only about retailing to also thinking about data. And to do that, data had to become the big asset they needed to develop to provide new opportunities,” Datar says. “Even today, not all retailers have embraced data fully to the point where they think of themselves as data companies, and it might be why many companies are suffering.”

Several traditional retailers are indeed tripping over the digital divide. JC Penney has been tanking, with shares recently trading at $1.50. And in October, Sears filed for bankruptcy protection, following the dark road paved by Borders, RadioShack, and Toys ‘R’ Us.